I'm Mike LaRoche, I'm from Texas, and I drive a truck!

Great news today via Robert Stacy McCain: infamous America-hating Marxist historian Howard Zinn has kicked the bucket. Stacy writes: "At age 87, Zinn has become the only kind of good Commie."

Indeed.

What's funny about that Boston Globe article is its ridiculous headline: "Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87"

Challenged the status quo? I suppose the geniuses who came up with that headline don't realize that in academia, Zinn's views are the status quo. To be a communist on most college campuses is about as risky as being an Aggie fan in College Station. If you want to challenge the status quo, try being an academic historian who drives a pickup truck and is a life member of the National Rifle Association. Not that I would know anything about that personally...

Speaking of which, I love the defiant slogan that Scott Brown used during his Senate campaign up in Massachusetts: "I'm Scott Brown, I'm from Wrentham, and I drive a truck!" I have no doubt that it drove the champagne socialists in places like Cambridge up the wall. How apoplectic they must be to now have a pickup truck-driving, God-bothering teabagger as their newest U.S. Senator. Just delicious.

In light of the recent conservative uprising in Massachusetts, the words which Tom Kratman wrote last week in the comments concerning secession are well worth considering:

You recall the discussion we had a while back concerning a second round of secession? In light of this particular demonstration that not everybody in Yankeeland is either a red or even anything less than a patriot, contemplate what secession would mean to them. We'd be abandoning them to the left, when they have as much right to our protection as they've given in blood, treasure, and sweat to protect us, both recently and over the centuries. How do we do that? Morally, how do we do that?

That was, by the way, one of the reasons secession, last time, led to civil war. In all but one or two cases (Virginia, forex), secession didn't arise from popular movements or voting but as a result of / through the machinations of small, self-interested cabals, the whole thing being started _literally_ by a conspiracy (to split the Democratic Party to ensure the election of Lincoln by large majorities overall in the North, to panic the South). Now, of course, secession was later ratified by massive enlistments, if not by massive votes. Even then, though, there were substantial minorities in the south who remained loyal to the Union. How could the Union, morally, have abandoned eastern Tennessee or northern Alabama? Or West Virginia?(And, by the way, there are approximately equal left wing arguments that they could not abandon liberal and/or poor southerners, or Nebraskans for that matter, to the right.)

Which is, again, why secession must be avoided if it can be avoided...because we would rip our own guts out if it happened.

A good point to ponder, for in the present struggle against the Obama tyranny, we are all Bay Staters now.